King weaves Billy’s novel into this one, first a few paragraphs, then pages and chapters, and it’s a hell of a story. The plan is a bit too elaborate, but Billy goes with it, moving into the house Nick has rented for him in a suburban family neighborhood and into the rented office downtown with a clear view of the courthouse.

Nick declines to identify the person who wants Allen killed, but he has an elaborate plan for Billy to move to the city and await Allen’s extradition from California, then shoot him on the courthouse steps. She pepper-sprayed him, and now Joel Allen is sitting in the Los Angeles jail.īilly and Nick don’t meet in Las Vegas to discuss the job, but in a fictional small city that “sits east of the Mississippi and just below the Mason-Dixon line.” More to the point, it’s a city where Joel Allen is wanted for shooting two men, one of them fatally, not on assignment but after losing big in a poker game - and it’s in a death penalty state, where a hitman looking at execution might make a deal and spill some secrets about his employers. The target, Nick tells him, is also a hitman, but one who has gone off the rails and been arrested for assault after propositioning a feminist writer he mistook for a hooker. King has never been better than he is here at wrapping readers into a propulsive, many-tentacled narrative-complete with a perfectly orchestrated, moving ending.Billy has worked before with the go-between who hires him, a Las Vegas mobster named Nick Majarian. More road trips follow, as Alice emerges as a scene-stealing heroine on her own coming-of-age journey. Laying low after the hit (and after he realizes he’s been tabbed as a fall guy), Billy saves college student Alice, a rape victim, and the two hit the road, driving cross-country to Denver, where Billy gathers information from his former handler, a wonderfully realized, grandfatherly outlaw, and begins to track the bad guys behind the frame. The job requires lead time, during which Billy poses as a writer and finds that he likes it he’s good, too, as we find ourselves totally drawn into the tale of Billy’s dysfunctional family, his years in a juvenile detention home, and his experience during the Iraq War. Billy Summers is a former Marine sniper who, like Max Allan Collins’ Quarry, only hits bad guys Billy wants out of the game, but he needs a stake. How different? King has multiple novels in play here-a thriller, at least two coming-of-age stories, and a knockout road novel-and he knits them together beautifully, never missing a stitch.

One last job? Again? But, when even the fictional character embarking on that last job is aware he’s trapped in a trope, you know you’re in for something different.

Review of billy summers